Summer Session B

AML 6027

Modern American Poetry and Film

From modernist cinepoems and “city symphony” films to recent inquiries into “documentary poetics,” poetry and film have been productive cultural collaborators. This seminar will examine cross currents between the two media, with a particular emphasis on the long poem and epic film. Ambitious, stylized, and meticulously researched, these expansive genres tend to draw heavily on ancient Mediterranean cultures and contemporary geopolitics. In our discussions, we will consider questions such as: Is there a poetics of epic film, and a cinematic dimension to the modern long poem? Why did the 1920s prove so conducive to both genre’s emergence? What factors shaped epic film’s postwar resurgence and revision?

Poems will include T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, selections from Ezra Pound’s Cantos, Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead, William Carlos Williams, Paterson, Langston Hughes’ Montage of a Dream Deferred, and H.D.’s Helen in Egypt. Films will include Intolerance (D.W. Griffith), Manhatta (Paul Strand/Charles Sheeler), The Plow That Broke the Plains and The River (Pare Lorentz), Cleopatra and The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille), and Helen of Troy (Robert Wise). We will also read parts of Franco Moretti’s Modern Epic, as well as articles from scholarly journals.